From the Elephant's Back (26 page)

Groddeck would have smiled and agreed, for the principle of non-attachment is certainly the kernel of his philosophy; but the temper of his mind is far more Greek than Indian. And his method of exposition combines hard sane clinical fact with theory in exactly balanced quantities. One has the feeling in reading him that however fantastic a proposition may seem it has come out of the workshop and not out of an ideological hothouse.

Four books bearing his name have been published in England. Of these the only one which pretends to completeness is
The Book of the It
;
[16]
the three other titles are composed of essays and various papers, strung together by his translator. They are
The World of Man, The Unknown Self
, and
Exploring the Unconscious
. At the time of writing they are all unfortunately out of print. The first and third volumes contain a thorough exposition of his views on the nature of health and disease;
The World of Man
contains the unfinished groundwork of his projected study on the nature of pictorial art. The last volume also contains some general art-criticism, but is chiefly remarkable for an essay entitled
Unconscious Factors in Organic Process
which sets out his views on massage, and contains a sort of new anatomy of the body in terms of psychological processes.
[17]
Despite the fearfully muddled arrangement of these papers, not to mention a translation which confessedly misses half the poetry and style of the original, these books should all be read if we are to get any kind of full picture of Groddeck's mind at work.

Even Groddeck's greatest opponents in Germany could not but admit to his genius, and to the wealth of brilliant medical observations contained in his books; it is to be sincerely hoped that he will soon occupy his true place in England as a thinker of importance and a doctor with something important to say. It is fourteen years since Groddeck's death and his complete work is still not available to the general public in England. Why?

For the purposes of this brief essay, however, I have struck as far as possible to the philosophy behind his practice, and have not entered into a detailed exposition of his medical beliefs and their clinical application; with a writer as lucid and brilliant as Groddeck one is always in danger of muddying the clear waters of his exposition with top heavy glozes and turbid commentaries. In his work, theory and fact are so skillfully woven up that one is always in danger of damaging the tissue of his thoughts in attempting to take it to pieces. I am content if I have managed to capture the ego-It polarity of his philosophy, and his conception of man as an organic whole. But as with everything in Groddeck one feels that manner and matter are so well-married in him that any attempt to explain him in different words must read as clumsily as a schoolboy's paraphrase of
Hamlet
. This fear must excuse my ending here with a final quotation.

Every observation is necessarily one-sided, every opinion a falsification. The act of observing disintegrates a whole into different fields of observation, whilst in order to arrive at an opinion one must first dissect a whole and then disregard certain of its parts.…At the present time we are trying to recover the earlier conception of a unit, the body-mind, and make it the foundation of our theory and action. My own opinion is that this assumption is one we all naturally make and never entirely abandon and, furthermore, that by our heritage of thought, we Europeans are all led to trace a relationship between the
individuum
and the cosmos.…We understand man better when we see the whole in each of his parts, and we get nearer to a conception of the universe when we look upon him as part of the whole.

Constant Zarian

Triple Exile

1952

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE WRITINGS
of Constant Zarian
[1]
is long overdue—and would no doubt have long since been given had not the general inaccessibility of his writings in the Armenian language left the common reader in Europe with only a slender sheaf of poems and essays in French by which to judge him. Now, in his sixty-third year, however, he is within striking distance of the European reputation which must follow the forthcoming translation of his books into French and German—and as such he commands the attention of the serious reader in England.

But fame—or even for that matter recognition—are matters of indifference to this much travelled man of letters who now lives quietly on the island of his choice in the Gulf of Naples, happy in the memory of a long life well spent in travel and friendship, in good living and good writing.

Zarian was born in the Caucasus, in the province of Shirvan, which, he says somewhere in a biographical note, was “well-known for its poets, roses, nightingales and its periodical earthquakes.” He adds: “So at the very start I absorbed poetry and a certain anxiety from my natal place.” Poetry and anxiety! An auspicious conjunction of qualities for a twentieth-century man! He attended a local school for some years before his parents, who were people of substance and position, decided to send him to France to be educated.

Paris provided the school, and Brussels the university—but the results of a Western education were to be quite unforeseen by his parents. Zarian emerged from his studies as a promising poet. He joined the group of flourishing young Belgian poets who at this time gathered round Emil Verhaeren,
[2]
and his first essays in poetry marked him as a young man of determined and forcible talent.

By now his writings had reached Russia and the Czarist authorities responded to them by forbidding his return; his disgusted family repudiated him; henceforth poetry was to become both a fatherland and a family. At this time his work in French had already earned him a deserved reputation as a writer to be watched. But now came a change.

He had by this time all but forgotten his native language; “only some of my prayers, learned during childhood, clung with obstinacy to me.” One night after a memorable conversation with Verhaeren he took, on the advice of the elder poet, the decision to re-learn Armenian, and henceforth only to write in his native tongue. At this time the theories about the “autochthonous artist” were very much in the air, and Verhaeren assured him that however well he wrote in French he would always remain a
deraciné
, a rootless emigrant in French literature. Why should he not become, although an exile, a mouthpiece for his own people? The artist should accept the responsibilities conferred upon him by the native ties of birth and tongue—and by his stars.

Zarian went to Venice where, on the island of San Lazaro, the monks of the Armenian monastery undertook to teach him his native language and (almost more important) gave him enough work as a translator to enable him to live. In the room, at the very table, where once Byron
[3]
had started to study Armenian, Zarian undertook this rediscovery of himself. “I realised now,” he writes, “that language is simply part of the blood that circulates throughout one's body; one doesn't learn it, but simply discovers it.” For several years, absorbed in this self-discovery, he remained in Venice perfecting the instrument which he was henceforth to use.

But it was not enough simply to reclaim the lost power of his native language; as an active and energetic writer with a mission, his duty was to turn his talents towards his own people. But how could he reach them—since he was now a political exile? In 1912 he was to be found in Constantinople, living in the greatest poverty, and gathering round him a group of exiled talents to help him with the foundation of a free literary newspaper written in Armenian. He recognised clearly that a writer's duty is to devote himself to the field of human values and not to waste his talent on ephemeral political polemic. Politics change; values—the true workshop of the poet—have to be perpetually examined and recreated from new points of view. Their basic substance is unchanged, however, since they deal not with the temporal condition of man but with his unchanging inner disposition. They have to be reworked in every generation—“as bread is always the same but has to be kneaded and composed afresh every day if it is to be palatable.”

But the outbreak of the First World War put an abrupt end to these considerations; the little band of intellectuals was abruptly dispersed. Escaping arrest by the Turks, Zarian crossed the boarder into Bulgaria and thence made his way to Italy. Here he composed his “Three Mysteries,” a pantheistic poem of great force and beauty which, in Italian translation, earned him immediate recognition and which was put to music by Ottorino Respighi.
[4]

At the end of the war Zarian returned to Constantinople to continue his literary work, and in 1920 accepted an invitation by the Soviet authorities to return to Armenia with full honours. He was to have a chair founded for him at the University of Erevan.
[5]
He accepted the invitation and returned. He determined to stay and help the revolutionaries to found their promised Utopia. It took him two years to understand finally the full horror of the system that had been imposed upon his own people. In 1924 he fled.

To those who come back, he will tell you, after having fully tasted the fruits of Communism in Russia, Europe seems a strangely unreal thing; and the values of Europe acquire all of a sudden a new perspective. What are all these people talking about, the traveller asks himself, as everywhere around him he sees traces of a moral order, a coherence in values, a
culture
which has been systematically extirpated behind the curtain? The virtues so far outweigh the defects that it seems incredible to him that he himself was once among those sentimental believers who wished for a new Marxist Utopia and the end of capitalism. To those who have the chance fully to compare the two systems the shock is a very profound one. Not only does capitalism offer the worker a far better chance of ameliorating his lot,
but in every way and from every point of view
it is superior to the paltry materialistic inventions of that dated humbug, the Communist, whose politics are based upon a pipe-dream which in turn is based upon a social grudge.
[6]
It was from this new angle of vision that the disappointed poet saw Europe on his return.

Many people since Zarian have learned the lesson, too; but for him the shock was perhaps greater, since it concerned his own country and his own people. He had always been disposed to listen openly to criticisms of Communism; no doubt he had always agreed the earlier stages were clumsy, crude, and mistaken. Nevertheless, it offered hopes of equality and justice. But after an exposure to it at first hand he realised with alarm that the system itself did not work (regardless of whether it were to be applied by angels or gangsters). Based on a futile actuary's view of the universe, it laid low every seed of culture and growth that a thousand years of Christian humanism had offered to the Western European. It was the deliberate enemy of the imagination, of love, of every faculty and grace that one could prize as a human being. And here was another paradox; he had expected to find that the Communist state was truly a worker's state and found that it was, in the most precise sense of the word, a state run by the failures of Bloomsbury.
[7]
Marxism was the bin into which every
manqué
poured the talents he could not exercise in the arts and sciences.

To return then, like Lazarus risen from the grave, and to find the currents still running strongly leftward in Europe, was something which made his blood run cold. Fifty years of sentimental agitation, of barren provincial Utopianism, had produced this attitude in public opinion. To read the utterances of a Shaw, a Haldane,
[8]
after leaving Armenia was almost to despair of the fate of Western Europe as such—for never had so gigantic and palpable a fraud, so hideous a tyranny ever been supported by so many men of apparent distinction and eminence.

Zarian has never ceased to believe in the artist as the responsible factor in human affairs; and the blame for this situation he laid, and still lays, at the door of the Western artist. The utter
irresponsibility
in human affairs which has characterised the artists of the last fifty years, he often insists, is something that can only be appreciated in all its richness by someone who has enjoyed the fruits of their agitation—a worker's state: at least so Zarian thought when, once more in France, he tried to assemble his ideas of the two years he had passed in his country. He was consumed by anxiety that Europe, with all its remediable faults, should be destroyed by the tyranny he saw approaching in so many seductive guises.

Marxism, he recognised, was itself the enemy, whether in the mild form of humanistic socialism advocated by the sentimental agitators of the west, or in its complete Soviet form; indeed one could only be a stepping stone to the other. What could he do to atone for his mistake? What kind of artist could he become without falling into the camp of the clericals, or the duller ranks of the quasi-reactionaries? How best could he contribute to the twentieth-century symposium?
[9]

It was these considerations that were finally to determine the shape and magnitude of the writings which, for the next twenty years and more, were to pour from his pen. It was no conscious choice that made Zarian a classical man—it was the development of a natural style of mind, founded in bitter experience and in a tenacious belief that if man was to be saved from destruction he stood in need of major artists of a new type—
responsible men
. His own task was no longer to reject, to criticise, to whine—but, in the deepest sense of the word, to submerge in the swift currents of history and to give their impulse direction and form. “To endure and contribute”—that was the new motto: and he has never deviated by a hairsbreadth from it in his attitude to his work and his people.